


Outside the Government, Beyond the Police

by ChronicBookworm



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Leverage
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Case Fic, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, F/M, Fobwatch (Doctor Who), Guns, Gunshot Wounds, Multi, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-07-28 05:24:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16235042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChronicBookworm/pseuds/ChronicBookworm
Summary: Someone is going after old companions of The Doctor. Leverage, the US agency for alien threats led by Nate Ford, is on it. But for one of the team, the case becomes intensely personal, and they may have bitten off more than they can chew...





	Outside the Government, Beyond the Police

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Karios](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Karios/gifts).



 

_Torchwood: outside the government, beyond the police. Fighting for the future on behalf of the human race. The 21st century is when everything changes. And Torchwood is ready._

 

“I’m not ready! Do you hear me? I am not ready!” Hardison’s voice sounded panicked over the comm, but then he often did, so Parker didn’t pay him much attention.

“We need to go _now,_ Hardison! These energy readings are fading – if we don’t get there soon they might be gone,” Sophie said, handing off the scanner to Parker, who glanced at them. Yup, definitely weird readings. Which in their business tended to mean aliens. She handed the scanner off to Nate. He usually appreciated knowing details like that.

“I’m working on it,” Hardison complained, before: “All right, alarms disabled. Go.”

This was Parker’s cue, and she got her lock-picks out. It was a surprisingly tricky lock, but she wasn’t the best for nothing. They swung open the door, only to find an old man in the hallway, standing right in front of the door. He was must have been in his 80s at least. Stick thin, with a fairly large nose and angular jaw.

“Well, you took your bloody time,” said the old man leaning on his cane. He spoke with an English accent. “Also, don’t you people knock?”

“We tried,” Sophie lied. “Nobody answered, so we thought we’d better check.”

“Well, you either didn’t knock hard enough, or I must be going deaf in my old age. Used to be, I could hear every little thing that went on in this house. These days I don’t discover the break-in until my wife’s clobbered the robber over the head. Too bad she got away. The robber, I mean, not my wife. Funny thing, getting old, eh? You’d be the police, then? Too bad you didn’t show up half an hour ago – you’d have caught whoever it was in the act.”

“Ah, yes. Yes we are from the police,” Sophie said, flashing a badge. It was a police badge. It wasn’t genuine. “We heard you called in a robbery, and we’re here to check it out. Can you talk us through what happened?”

“Who’s that at the door?” a female voice called out, before the old man was joined by his wife. She was as old as him, but her face was more rounded, and lined with laugh-lines. Her accent wasn’t quite English, but it was one of the accents from Britain. Welsh or Scottish, Parker supposed.

“You don’t _look_ like police,” said the old lady. Clearly they were still with it, mentally, despite being so old – Parker had met a lot of more gullible people who were a lot younger.

“How do police look?” asked Sophie.

“Not like you. I’d know, I used to talk to police all the time in my job. I was a journalist, you know. Still am. And they didn’t have English accents, either.”

“Well, actually – ” interjected her husband.

“Yes, obviously they did in _England_ ,” interrupted the lady.

“Perhaps we can get back to the robbery?” Sophie prompted gently.

Parker left to explore the house while they were busy. Sophie was better at the people stuff, anyway.

 

“The thieves were after this,” Nate said, placing the object on the table they were all sitting round. “But they didn’t get it. Mr and Mrs Williams were very keen to hold on to it. I had to promise I’d give it back when we were done with the investigation. Which, obviously, we’re not doing, so we have to figure out a way to get them off our back, because geriatric or not, I have a feeling they’d come after us.”

“It’s a warning system. Works like an alarm, you can key it to certain atomic signatures,” Eliot said. “It’s from the planet Cinethon.”

“How do you know that?” Parker asked him, hanging upside down over her favourite sofa arm.

“It’s got a distinctive glow,” said Eliot. Parker hadn’t noticed a particular glow, but she’d learnt to trust Eliot on these things by now.

“How do you know all these things?” Hardison asked, but really he was complaining. “How can you identify alien artefacts at the drop of a hat when nobody else has ever seen anything like it before, not even Nate?”

“I used to travel,” said Eliot shortly.

“You used to travel _in space_?”

“There’s a rift in time and space in Boston, and you don’t believe I could have travelled in space?”

“I didn’t say that. I _did not_ say that!” He paused for a beat. “But you got to admit, it does sound a bit far-fetched.”

“I’ll give _you_ far-fetched,” Eliot snarled at him.

“Guys, can we focus please?” Nate asked. Parker was almost disappointed – she always did like to hear Eliot and Hardison snipe at each other in increasingly creative ways.

 

A few hours later, they were eating a dinner that Eliot had prepared for them, when Hardison raised the subject again.

“But seriously? Did you serve on a spaceship or something?”

“It wasn’t a spaceship,” Eliot replied.

“You used to travel in space _without a spaceship_?” Hardison’s voice rose another two steps in pitch. Parker wondered how high he could go before his voice broke.

“Hardison, drop it, okay?”

“Drop it? No, I will not drop it! I can’t believe you used to _travel in space_ , and I didn’t hear about it until now!”

“How do you think I got recruited to Leverage?”

“I thought you stumbled across it on accident and for some reason, they decided not to give you Retcon, like the rest of us?”

“Well, I didn’t, so drop it,” Eliot said.

“Ok, ok, jeez. Some people are so touchy,” Hardison muttered under his breath.

Eliot growled at him, but didn’t actually threaten or deliver physical violence. Somehow, Hardison always knew exactly how far to push, and no further. Parker wondered how he did it.

Eliot had been there when Parker started at Leverage. Parker had tried to steal from them, and when she’d got caught, she’d been told her options were either to join them, or to lose all memories of the past week. Obviously she chose option one. Hardison had hacked his way in – or tried at least. He hadn’t quite been prepared for their alien security system. But he’d gotten far enough to impress whoever made the decisions on whom to hire those days, and so there he was. Nate joined after aliens took his son. He’d gone mad for a bit, then he got drunk, and then he decided that his main task in life would be to protect earth from aliens, and got roped into the shadowy organisation known as Leverage by Victor Dubenich, who had been an agent of Torchwood One, Leverage’s sister organisation in London. Nate had been given power to run Leverage – operating under the vague directions of Victor Dubenich until Dubenich had gotten himself killed working on the Cyberman project. Parker couldn’t bring herself to feel upset about it when they’d learned he’d died in the Cyberman invasion, and she had the feeling that none of the others had really mourned, either.

Somehow Nate had managed to turn a bunch of half-feral criminals into something resembling a team, and made them smarter and more effective while at it. Nate was the one who recruited Sophie, the only one he picked for the team. Parker wasn’t sure exactly what was going on between them, but there was definitely something. In the past year, their puzzle pieces had clicked in a way they hadn’t before. But she wasn’t sure if they knew or not, and if they did know, what they’d decided to do about it. Nate and Sophie could be… weird… about each other sometimes. They were just as likely to just ignore any clicking puzzle connections as they were to do something about it. But it wasn’t Parker’s business, so she didn’t really care – she just kept an eye on it in case it started to become her business.

“Uh-oh,” Hardison said. “I’m getting that same weird energy reading from a place in New York.”

“I guess we’re going to New York,” Nate said. “Let’s go steal another alien artefact.”

“But first we have to finish dinner, or Eliot will be sad,” Parker said, and even though he objected that he didn’t care, it was just the waste of food that bothered him, Parker thought he was actually secretly touched. She liked doing nice things like that for Eliot and Hardison, it made her feel fuzzy inside.

 

Sophie and Nate tracked the energy signal to another home in New York, but by then whoever it was had been and gone, just like at the Williams’ place. The victim this time was a middle-aged doctor called Grace Holloway.

“I know that name,” Eliot said, sitting opposite the TV with Nate and Sophie’s faces projected. Parker was draped across the other sofa, with her head on Hardison’s lap and her feet thrown over Eliot’s legs. He’d glared at her when she threw herself over them, but hadn’t pushed her away, so she knew he didn’t really mind.

“Anything you care to share with the class?” Nate asked.

“Not yet,” said Eliot. “Hardison, what was Mrs Williams’ maiden name?”

“Uh, hang on,” Hadison said, leaning over so he could get at the laptop without disturbing Parker, “it was Pond.”

“Of course. Amy and Rory Pond. I can’t believe I didn’t see it.”

“What should you have seen, Eliot?” Nate was getting impatient.

“Hardison, I need you to look up some people for me.”

“OK, bro, I got you.”

“Susan Campbell. Ian and Barbara Chesterton. Dorothea Chaplet. Polly and Ben Jackson. Victoria Waterfield. Liz Shaw. Josephine Grant. Sarah Jane Smith. Tegan Jovanka. Dorothy McShane. Mickey Smith. Donna Noble. Martha Jones.” He paused. “Jack Harkness.”

“Hold on, hold on. You’re going too fast, and some of those are very common names. Anything you can give me to narrow it down?”

“No.”

“Then you’re gonna have to wait, because this will take me some time. Wait, did you say Jack Harkness? As in Torchwood Three, Jack Harkness? ”

“Torchwood Three? Aren’t they those clowns who almost sparked the Apocalypse once? Are you saying we might have to work with them?” Sophie complained.

“It’s probably more than once,” Eliot said. “Knowing Three.”

“I don’t see the problem,” Parker commented. “I mean, we’re still here, so obviously they didn’t _actually_ spark the Apocalypse.”

“People! I am _working_! Go and punch some stuff or climb some vents or do whatever you want, as long as you do it somewhere that is not here!”

“All right, let’s give the man some peace,” Nate decided. Parker decided that it did mean her, as well, so she went to see how quickly she could break into the second-hand shop over the road. Not to steal anything, of course. Just to see how quickly she could. She’d leave them a nice note with suggestions for security improvements when she was done.

 

A few hours later, Nate and Sophie had returned from their interview with Grace Holloway in New York, without having learned much of value, but Hardison had results.

“So, a lot of the names Eliot gave me can’t be traced, and a lot of them live in England. But you were right to have me check them out - there were a lot of break-ins recently among those who could be found. Donna Noble, Mickey Smith, and Martha Jones all reported a break-in in the last few months. Similar MO, no injuries, nothing was taken, so the police haven’t put a lot of effort into following up any of the cases.”

“So, what connects these people?” Nate asked, walking back and forth in front of them. He did not appreciate being left out of the loop.

“They’re all companions,” Eliot said.

“I take it we don’t mean Firefly Companions?” Hardison asked.

Eliot rolled his eyes.

“Companions of The Doctor. I thought that would be obvious from the topic of the discussion of weird alien artefacts.”

“Isn’t The Doctor Torchwood's Enemy One?” Parker asked. There had been something about that in the introductory materials she hadn’t bothered to read.

“Nah, that’s Torchwood One stuff,” Hardison replied. “Torchwood Three likes The Doctor.”

“And what about Leverage?” Parker asked. Leverage was the most important, since they were Leverage, which was technically part of Torchwood, but mostly they did their own thing.

“We like The Doctor,” Eliot said firmly.

“We do?” Hardison asked. “I mean, yeah, we do. We like him lots,” he amended at Eliot’s glare.

“So, something or someone is hitting up past companions. Who and why?” Sophie asked.

“That’s the question, isn’t it? Hardison, what’s the pattern?”

“OK, the burglaries started in the UK, and now it seems the culprit has moved to the US. The most likely suspect is this,” and he projected an image of a middle-aged woman with dark brown hair and a frilly blouse onto the screen. “A few days before each burglary, she’s approached the victims claiming to buy and sell antiques, and she’s wondering if they need cash. Calls herself Jane Smith – but it’s obviously an assumed identity. She hasn’t even put any work into it! No school records, no past history, nothing – one day she just turned up calling herself ‘Jane Smith’, as if anyone would believe that’s a real name.” Hardison sounded equal parts disgusted and offended, like his professional pride was being insulted.

“So she comes in, scopes for valuables to steal, and then steals them,” Parker said, jumping to the obvious conclusion. Sometimes, the classics really were the most effective.

“Sure, that’s the theory, but it doesn’t quite fit. As I said, nobody’s been hurt, and most importantly, there’s nothing missing.”

“So she’s looking for something,” Sophie said. “Something one of the companions has, but she doesn’t know which one.”

“So we bait a trap,” Nate said. “We know she’s in the US, we make her think we know one of the companions, and have the item she’s looking for, and then we sell a fake version of whatever it is to her. Sophie, Eliot, you’ll make contact and find out what she’s looking for. Hardison, I need you to be ready to fake whatever it is. Parker, I need you to break into her house and find out whatever you can about her.”

“Sure, that’s a great plan,” Hardison said. “The only problem is, and this is a detail really, we don’t know any companions she hasn’t already hit, or at least, none on Earth. I checked out every name Eliot gave me – they’re either dead, vanished without a trace, or she’s already been there. Am I supposed to start making up companions from thin air?”

“Don’t need to,” Eliot said. “There’s at least one companion left. You’ve got one right here.”

“ _What?!_ ” Hardison gaped.

None of them got much work done after that point, but no matter how they asked, Eliot wouldn’t tell them anything else.

 

Parker wasn’t quite sure how Hardison did his magic of tracking down the woman, but sooner rather than later, they had a location, and she was sent to case the house she used while Sophie (going by the name of Helen) accidentally bumped into her and fed her the story they’d cooked up about Sophie’s (Helen’s) aunt who’d died, giving her guardianship and power of attorney over her cousin who was delusional and thought he’d travelled in time and space in a blue police box, and who Sophie (Helen) had been forced to have committed to an asylum for his own sake, leaving her to sort out all the rubbish he’d left behind, while he claimed it was extremely valuable and important to the safety of the universe.

Parker half listened to how she took the woman for a ride, dropping just enough hints to have Jane Smith tease the story out of her, while she was working on the security system. The system was good, but Parker was better.

The house was filled with all kinds of alien artefacts, and in any other circumstances, Leverage would be all over it, but they were playing the long con on this, so Parker ignored confiscating stuff, and just relayed whatever she found to Nate, Hardison and Eliot, on comms.

The most interesting thing she found, with the most potential clues to Jane Smith’s actual identity, was a diary filled with drawings of alien beings. Jane also wrote about dreaming of all sorts of creatures, and flying through time and space in a sentient spaceship, which sounded oddly similar to the Doctor’s T.A.R.D.I.S. But it was clear she didn’t know how much of her dreams were reality, because there were two pages just filled with exclamation marks from when she’d met her first alien, followed by a re-hashing of all her dreams, wondering if all of them were true. There were also a few odd mentions of having migraines, and constantly having the repetitive four-knock rhythm in her mind, almost as if someone was playing the drums constantly in her head.

“Parker, get out of there, now,” Eliot ground out as soon as she read that part out loud to them.

“I’m not done!” Parker objected – she hadn’t even gone into the basement yet, and there was bound to be much more of interest there.

“ _Now_!” Eliot repeated, and the urgency in his tone made Parker sigh heavily, put the book back where she found it, get out of the house, and lock the door behind her.

 

“This is seriously bad news,” Eliot told the group later, once Parker had returned to Nate’s flat empty-handed and Sophie had politely extricated herself from Jane’s company, with the promise to do lunch sometime soon. “We’re dealing with a Time Lord called The Master, or in her new regeneration, Missy, short for The Mistress. That should you all you need to know about what kind of person she is.”

Hardison took over when it seemed like Eliot wasn’t going to continue.

“A few years ago he assumed the identity of Harold Saxon, Prime Minister of Britain, and opened the world up to an alien invasion. There was time reset stuff that Jack Harkness was there for, none of us remember it, but the events from Harkness’ memory are logged in Torchwood Three’s internal archive under some seriously heavy protection. It was really, really bad. End of the world, a tenth of the entire world population killed, Russia wiped off the map kind of bad. Apparently we were all executed for being part of the resistance, right before the actual reset. We lasted a year in that world, and Harkness made it sound like an achievement.”

“I guess we should feel proud of ourselves,” Parker said, but it came out sounding a bit hollow. A tenth of the world population? That was a lot of people.

“So, what do we do now? Do we back out, call for back-up? Maybe Harkness can help. How well do you know him?” Sophie asked Eliot.

“No,” Nate said. “We need to use this opportunity to catch the threat.”

“This is a _Time Lord_ ,” Hardison said. “Dude got himself elected Prime Minister of Britain when _nobody_ had heard of him the year before. She’s like the anti-Doctor. The Doctor, but bad. She is _out of our league_.”

“ _Nobody_ is out of our league.”

“You’re going to get Eliot killed,” Parker told Nate.

“No, it’ll be fine. Trust me,” Nate said. Parker didn’t think she’d ever heard him say anything so worrying.

 

Eliot checked in to an asylum, under his own name, with his own story. They hadn’t wanted to take him as an inpatient first, deeming him to pose no danger to either himself or others, but a highly generous bribe had made them admit him for just a few days, if he felt like it would help, but absolutely no more. He was terse and tense throughout, no doubt feeling like it was a stain on his fragile masculinity (Eliot got a bit funny about that, sometimes), but in the end, they’d decided it was the best way.

Sophie/Helen brought Jane/Missy to visit him on the second day he was there. The rest of them were hiding in Lucille, ready to spring into action if anything went wrong.

“Hello, Eliot darling, Cousin Helen’s come to visit you,” Sophie said, putting on a sing-song condescending voice. “I’ve brought someone to see you, isn’t that lovely?”

“You don’t need to use that voice on me, I’m not crazy,” Eliot growled.

“I know you’re not, darling, you just have delusions, it’s nothing to be ashamed about. Honestly, if you didn’t insist they were real, I’d have admired you on your imagination and told you to write a book. Tell Jane about the spaceship and the Doctor, Eliot, I’m sure she’d love to hear it,” Sophie continued, with no noticeable change in her voice. It set Parker’s teeth on edge, and she wasn’t the one being condescended to. Sophie was _good_.

“I’m not a performing monkey,” Eliot objected. “I’m not going to tell you stuff you’ll only laugh about later.”

“Eliot,” Jane/Missy broke in, “I promise you I won’t laugh at you.”

There was a pause, and Parker knew Eliot was sizing Jane/Missy up in the searching way he had.

“You mean it?” he asked, sounding both vulnerable and hopeful, in that way that could make anyone’s heart melt. Parker took a moment to admire his talent at grifting, for all he pretended to be just dumb muscle.

“Absolutely,” said Jane/Missy.

So Eliot told her about how he’d worked as a bodyguard for a billionaire collector of alien artefacts, met the Doctor and Rose, and had a brief flirtation with Rose that ended with her offering him a chance to travel with them when his boss had accidentally released an alien murder species, how they’d gone to a space station in the future and taken down a slave empire, gone to London during the Blitz and almost been killed by a gas mask-wearing child, gone to Cardiff and found out the Mayor was an alien who was going to explode a nuclear power station to send a message home, gone back to the space station and got cast in an extreme version of Britain’s Got Talent, and then discovered the station was infested by Daleks.

“And then what?” Jane/Missy asked breathlessly.

“Then I came home,” he said with an air of finality. “The Doctor visits every now and again, but that’s it.”

“That’s it?” she asked, sounding disappointed.

“That’s it.”

“The Doctor didn’t give you anything in particular? Anything valuable? Did he tell you any secrets?”

“No,” he said. “And even if he did, I wouldn’t go and sell him out to someone like you.”

“I can make it worth your while,” she insisted.

“I’m not interested in selling to you,” he said. “I want to be left alone now.”

“Of course, darling. Cousin Helen will come back next week, okay? That’s in seven sleeps from now.”

“I know how long a week is, Helen,” he growled. “I’m not a child and I’m _not_ _crazy_.”

“Of course not, darling, the doctor said you were doing _so_ _well_ ,” Sophie cooed as she kissed his cheek. Parker wondered how hard he was holding himself back from punching her.

 

“He was lying,” Jane/Missy said as soon as they got out.

“What do you mean?” Sophie asked.

“When he said the Doctor hadn’t given him anything to keep, he was lying.”

“Jane, honey, you do realise that my cousin is delusional? Nothing he says is real.”

“Yes, yes, obviously, but he was lying – there is something that he thinks the Doctor gave him that’s important or valuable. “It might be important or valuable in real life. As I said, I’m a trader in antiques and curiosities – I would be very interested in taking a look at what he’s got. If he’s not interested in what I could pay for it, I’m sure you are. After all, you do deserve some compensation for your trouble.”

“It has been difficult, getting him a place in the asylum,” Sophie conceded, pretending to be reluctant. “And it’s not easy, making the time to visit him _every week_. I mean, I wasn’t lying when I said it’s all rubbish, but if you’re really interested you can take a look. Anything in particular you’re after?”

“Oh, I think I’ll know it when I see it,” Jane/Missy said. “I just _know_ there is something I’m missing.”

 

Sophie took Jane/Missy back to the old house they’d rented for this part of the con, so she could rummage through Eliot’s old things – carefully staged, of course. They’d had to use real alien artefacts to make it look convincing, but the plan was that if she did buy anything, Parker would steal it back from her. Eliot hadn’t exactly been happy about the plan, but Parker was fairly confident she could do it. In the end, it turned out she wouldn’t have to.

“She did look a bit closely at something that looked like a wristwatch, but then she said that wasn’t it, and threw it across the room. Who does that?” Sophie asked indignantly, sitting in the sofa’s in Nate’s living room. “That was a priceless alien artefact!”

“Actually, that was just a wristwatch,” Nate said. “My old one – I tossed a bit of worthless junk in there to make it look less staged.”

“I know what she’s after, if she's looking for a watch,” Eliot said. “It’s an old fobwatch the Doctor placed in my care – he was going back to Gallifrey after its return to this reality, and didn’t want any questions asked. If she gets her hands on it…”

“What’s so special about this fobwatch?” Parker asked. She was upright sitting like normal people did, but if she leaned slightly closer to Eliot to remind him he still had his team, well, nobody needed to know.

“I can’t tell you that,” Eliot said.

“What’ll happen if she does get her hands on it?”

“I can’t tell you that either.”

“Well, what can you tell us?”

“I can tell you if she gets her hands on it, it would be very, very bad.”

“So, basically, we need to set this up perfectly, is what you’re saying,” Nate said.

“I can _not_ believe we are going through with grifting the Master, the most dangerous Time Lord known to history – and I mean _all of_ history,” Hardison muttered.

“Why, are you scared?” Eliot asked.

“No,” Hardison said defensively.

“You should be.”

“You know, that does not make me feel any better.”

“Yeah, yeah, Hardison, we know already. How soon can you be ready?” Nate asked.

“To do this perfectly? A week, at least.”

 

A week later, Sophie made the call to Missy that she’d found a fobwatch in Eliot’s things, and, since she seemed interested in the wristwatch, maybe she’d want to take a look at it. They set up a meeting the next day. It went well at first, Sophie doing her magic, pretending to be Helen, the concerned cousin, selling an old fobwatch because she didn’t think it had any true value, to pay for the fees of the mental hospital. Until the point when her voice came over the comms, unnaturally calm.

“There is no need to wave gun at me. We can still work this out, Jane.”

 _Gun?!!_ They all rushed out of the van.

“Guys, you storming in there will just make it worse. Sophie’s got this,” Nate said, but he sounded as worried as Nate ever sounded. None of them paid him any attention, and when they piled out of the van, Nate was second, just after Eliot. Hardison even had to take a step backwards to avoid Nate’s elbow to his face.

“I know who you are,” Missy said. “I know you’re a bunch of con men. You thought you could fool me, but I’m afraid you can’t. So why don’t you get everyone else in here, and we can give up the game.”

Sophie and Missy were in the living room of the house they’d rented for the scam, pretending it was hers. They had the cardboard box of random alien junk they’d thrown together on the coffee table, and were stood facing off on either side of it. As the Leverage crew came in, Missy smiled at them.

“Well, how nice of you to join us!” she said.

Eliot glanced at the box.

“Ah, ah, ah,” Missy said. “No touching, naughty boy. I’m the one with the gun in this situation. But don’t worry, I won’t hurt anyone. I’ll take this and just be on my way.”

She reached out to grab the fobwatch from the box.

“So, what _is_ the deal with the watch?” Sophie asked, still in that unnaturally calm voice.

“It’s mine,” Missy said.

“But what makes it important? Why is this fobwatch special?”

“You don’t know either? I guess we’re all about to find out.”

She opened it. They waited a second. Everyone seemed to hold their breath.

Nothing happened.

“What did you _do_?”

“We didn’t do anything. It’s a watch,” Sophie said. She’d changed from her soothing voice to her con voice, and Parker hoped the difference was subtle enough to fool Missy. She would have said it would fool anyone except her, Nate, Eliot, and Hardison, but she didn’t know what Time Lords did and didn’t pick up on.

“No. No, this isn’t possible,” Missy said. “This was supposed to help me! This was supposed to _do something_!”

Sophie continued; “I told you, it’s just old rubbish. You’re right, we’re con men, although I really prefer grifters, but that doesn’t matter – we heard you were looking for alien stuff and thought we could run a scam on you.”

“Which, our bad, we’re very sorry, well just chalk this one up to experience and go on our way,” Nate continued.

“No, no. You had actual alien stuff! You had a sonic blaster! I want the real fobwatch, and you’re going to give it to me.”

“Yeah, there’s a problem with that,” Eliot said. “You can’t have it, because we don’t have it.”

He was lying of course. They’d used the original to make a fake from, and by the time Hardison was done, it was impossible to tell them apart, apparently even to Time Lords. Missy’s eyes narrowed.

“I don’t take kindly to people who try to cheat me.”

She aimed her gun at Eliot and pulled the trigger. He collapsed in a heap and a red splotch started spreading across his shirt. Parker stared at him. He didn’t –

He was –

Eliot –

“The rest of you can think about what you’ve done. I’ll come back for the real fobwatch in one week, and if I don’t get it then, well, you can pick who I shoot,” she sashayed out of the room.

Parker and Hardison threw themselves at Eliot, trying to search for any sign of life. Hardison tore his shirt open, pressing his hands against the wound in a futile attempt to stop the bleeding, but she knew. Eliot’s body was cooling down, and she couldn't feel his breath when she leaned her face against his. His heart was still under her hands.

And then it wasn’t.

Eliot drew in a gasp of air. His heart started beating. The hole in his chest knotted together.

“What?” he asked as he saw them all stand around him, tear tracks frozen on their faces. He put a hand on the floor and pushed himself up.

Parker threw her arms around him, and ended up in the middle of a very tight group hug, as Hardison, Sophie and Nate all piled in on top of her, trying to get at Eliot. Eliot yanked himself out of the hug, but Hardison kept a grip on his jacket.

“What the – ? You were dead. You were dead! Is this some kind of trick? Did you and Nate have something cooked up between you that you didn’t tell anyone else?”

“What, you think you can take the kinds of hits I do all the time and just walk away?” Eliot asked. He sounded more irritated than shaken, which both made Parker furious and calmed her down. How could he treat this as if it were nothing, an everyday occurrence? She had the horrible thought that maybe it _was_ an everyday occurrence, and they just hadn’t known.

“Are you an alien?” Hardison asked.

“No, I’m human. I just can’t die,” Eliot said, and when he saw that none of them were going to be satisfied with that non-explanation, continued with a sigh. “Something happened to me when I was travelling with the Doctor. Me and Jack Harkness – we both died on that space station, and then we woke up, and now neither of us can die. He had this time hopper thing, took us back to Earth since we knew the Doctor was going to come here sooner or later and it’s where I’m from originally, but he overshot by a wide margin and ended in the 1800s, got us recruited to Torchwood, he got sent to Three, I got sent to Leverage, and then we took the long way round. The Doctor showed up eventually and told us we were stuck like this.”

“And you didn’t think this was something you should tell us, your teammates?” Nate asked.

Eliot shrugged.

“I figured I’d tell you if it became relevant. Which it just did.”

“ _Unbelievable_ ,” Hardison said. He still hadn’t let go of Eliot’s jacket.

 

They got home and threw their clothes in the wash – all of them had ended up with Eliot’s blood all over their clothes. The mood was a weird mix of tense and relieved at the same time.

“So, what do we do now?” Hardison asked.

“We need to give her the real fobwatch,” Sophie said.

“We can’t.” Eliot’s tone brokered no compromise.

“So, what will actually happen if we give her the real one? I get that it’s bad, but she shot Eliot. You were _dead_ ,” Hardison said, his voice shaking just a tiny bit still. “That’s also pretty bad, as far as I’m concerned. It doesn’t happen again.”

“Agreed,” Parker said.

“He got better,” Nate said. The words might be callous, but Parker had been there, and he had been clinging as tightly to Eliot as any of them. She knew he did care, deep down. He was just busy working out how to take advantage of the new circumstances to pay much attention to how his words were coming across. Parker knew that about Nate, and she understood it, but she still had to fight down the urge to strangle him.

“Yeah, but we didn’t know that would happen, and neither did Missy. It was a fluke, a one-off, and we can’t count on being so lucky again,” she said instead, with a bit of a bite to her voice.

“If she gets her hands on that fobwatch, she’ll regain all her memories and knowledge of being a Time Lord and one of the most evil beings in the universe, while she’s on Earth with an axe to grind against us, specifically,” Eliot said, and yeah, Parker could see how that would be far less than ideal.

“Wait, why were her memories in the fobwatch to start off with?” Hardison asked.

“I don’t know. All I know is, the Doctor gave it to me, said it contained Missy’s memories, it was very important I kept it out of the right hands, and he was going to go to Gallifrey to do something incredibly important that he couldn’t have her interfering in. I’m not giving it up until he comes back for it.”

“OK, so we can’t give her a fake again, and we can’t give her the real one. I need ideas, people,” Nate said, but none of them could give him any.

“We call the one person who’s an expert on getting out of impossible situations,” Eliot said.

 

The Doctor showed up in a wheezing blue police box, exactly as the files said he did. He was an older man, dressed in a black jacket lined with red, thin and reedy and full of energy.

Eliot explained their problem as succinctly as possible, which, seeing as it was Eliot, was pretty succinct. The Doctor listened with a serious expression, then he nodded.

“Good, you kept it safe. Now it’s time for me to take the fobwatch and give Missy back what I stole from her. Everything’s sorted with Gallifrey.”

“You’re just going to give it back to her? She shot Eliot!” Parker couldn’t help but exclaim.

“She won’t be bothering you again,” he confirmed.

“She won’t be shooting any more of my crew?” Nate asked.

“I am sorry about that,” he said still with a serious expression on her face. Then it brightened. “But you seem to all be fine, so no harm done, eh? What’s a few gunshots between immortals? I’ll just collect Missy and be on my way.”

He hadn’t been there when they were handing over the fake pocket watch to Missy. He didn’t know that that was almost the exact phrase she’d used. Parker gritted her teeth and kept her smile of her face, even as she wanted to hyperventilate. Her hand was going numb from where Hardison was squeezing it.

“And you’re just going to tie everything up, just like that. The Doctor sweeps in, nothing to worry about any more,” Nate said, with an edge to his voice.

“Exactly, I’m glad we understand each other,” the Doctor said, sounding both relieved and confident. Wow. For someone who was meant to be so clever, The Doctor sure could be dense.

“Are you going to tell us what you needed Missy’s memories gone for, and why it was so important?” Eliot asked.

“No, I don’t think so. You don’t need to know that. I couldn’t explain it so you would understand anyway. But the universe thanks you.”

Parker thought maybe the Doctor was like Nate. They both tried very hard to be compassionate and to be good people, but sometimes they were too busy with the big picture, and they lost track of what people were actually feeling. But Parker noticed that Eliot was being even quieter than usual.

“I’ve decided that we don’t like The Doctor very much,” Parker told Hardison later, in private, when it was just the two of them snuggled up in Hardison’s bedroom.

“No, we do not,” he agreed. What she really liked about Hardison was how he was always on her page, she hardly ever had to stop and explain how she thought to him. “You think we should do something about it?”

 

The Doctor let them go into his T.A.R.D.I.S. before he left to find Missy and return her memories to her. Apparently he had to, out of a misplaced sense of ethics, and it was very hard to argue ethics with the Doctor (they had tried, and failed). He still wouldn’t tell them why he’d taken them in the first place, or what he was doing on Gallifrey. She hated him, a little bit, for that. Maybe if they’d known it was worth it, it would have been easier, but as it was, all she knew was that the fobwatch had gotten Eliot killed and they didn’t even know why (and it didn’t _matter_ that he’d gotten back up, was the thing that both Nate and the Doctor didn’t seem to get – _it didn’t matter_ ).

That didn’t stop them from enjoying the Doctor’s T.A.R.D.I.S., though, especially Hardison.

“It’s bigger on the inside,” he said with childlike wonder. Eliot and Parker shared a fond smile. Hardison put his hand on the T.A.R.D.I.S. wall and seemed to speak softly to her. It was almost as if the lights in his section shone a tiny bit brighter in response.

“What did you say to it?” Parker asked him, as the blue police box was wheezing its way out of existence.

“I told her to give The Doctor cold tea for a month because of what he did to Eliot. _Nobody_ gets Eliot shot and gets away with it.”

“Evil,” she told him. “I like it.”

Eliot didn’t say anything, which meant he was touched, but didn’t want to say anything because he thought it would be embarrassing to let them know that he was having emotions. It was okay. She and Hardison understood.

“Yeah, we look after our own, here at Leverage,” Hardison said with an air of satisfaction. “What did _you_ do?”

Parker let go of his hand briefly and pulled the Doctor's sonic screwdriver from beneath her shirt and showed it to him. Then she put it back and took his hand again.

“You know he’s going to come back for that, right?” Eliot asked.

“I know. We can yell at him for a bit when he does.”

“Girl, I like the way you think,” Hardison said.

They stood there, Hardison’s hand warm in hers, Eliot next to Hardison, looking at the spot where the T.A.R.D.I.S. had been.

“So, I guess that’s it,” Parker said finally, reluctantly.

“I guess so,” Hardison agreed, sounding just as unenthusiastic. “We apparently saved the universe, somehow.”

“We should have cake,” Parker said.

“I’m not making you guys cake,” Eliot said. Parker grinned at Hardison. Eliot was definitely making them cake.


End file.
